People

Principal investigator:

Eva Wittenberg

I am interested in how the mind assembles meaning, how this capacity came to be, and how it interacts with other cognitive abilities. I investigate the decisions that speakers face when they wrap their messages in grammar. Speakers make structural choices dozens of times per day, and listeners rapidly process them, make inferences about why something was said in a particular way, and create a representation of the speaker’s intended meaning in their minds.

Here is a short CV (email me for a comprehensive one).

Postdoc fellows:

Natalia Jardon

My research interests are primarily connected to the domain of events in language and cognition, and more specifically to the question of whether linguistically well-established primitives such as stativity and change are cognitively available beyond language. I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher at CEU since 2023.

PhD students:

Elena Marx

In general, my research focuses on questions at the interface of event perception and language. I am interested in how temporal relations between events are perceived, how such relations are encoded by language, and what the preconditions in temporal and event cognition are to understand and represent sequential relations between events. In this regard, I am looking into the developmental aspects of event cognition. I started my PhD program at CEU in Fall 2021.

Oliwia Iwan

I am studying general linguistics with a focus on syntax and cognition at the University of Vienna. My background is in general and comparative linguistics and philosophy. In my M.A. project, I investigated temporal structures in Polish past-under-past relative clauses. I will start my PhD program at CEU in Fall 2023.

Xueyi Yao (Icey)

I am generally interested in questions about event perception, event memory, and language. My PhD work explores how language reconstructs memories of events. I started my PhD program at CEU in 2023 Fall.

Benedek Bartha

I am interested in the relationships between language, cognition and communication, particularly in how speakers make informative and useful choices for the given context and partner(s) and how those choices interact with cross-linguistic patterns. My PhD investigates the evolution of evidentials (markers for information source) by asking how their use, learning and comprehension are influenced by varying communicative dynamics. I’m starting at CEU in Fall 2024.

Ebru Evcen (based at UC San Diego)

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the issues at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics cross-linguistically. My research focuses on how, as language unfolds, we incrementally build representations of the events described by that unfolding language and how speakers develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during comprehension. Currently, I am looking at how people interpret counterfactuals.

 Visiting students:

Anna Viola Sáfrány

I am a student in the Middle European interdisciplinary master's program in Cognitive Science with an academic background in linguistics, literature and translation. My research interests include the neural correlates of meaning-making and semantic violations as well as the social and political aspects of psycholinguistics. I am joining the Language Comprehension Lab in October 2024 to work on my master’s thesis as part of the LISA project and to gain experience in empirical research.

Zofia Kordas

I am a third-year Cognitive Science BA student at the University of Warsaw. During this semester, I am visiting Vienna as an Erasmus+ student at UniWie. My research interests include child language acquisition, word learning, and multilingualism in children. Currently, I am working on my paper on the cognate facilitation effect in bilingual children. I'm joining the Language Comprehension Lab in November 2024 as a short-term intern to gain research experience and broaden my knowledge in psycholinguistics.

Staff:

Attila Balla

I am a political scientist and psychologist, who graduated from CEU. I am generally interested in political psychology, political communication, and voting behavior. I am currently a PhD student at the social psychology program of Masaryk University and member of the Brno Lab of Intergroup Processes. PhD program of Masaryk I have been working as the lab manager of the Language Comprehension Lab since June 2022. 

Hannah Grobauer

I completed my Bachelor's degrees in Linguistics and Romance Studies at the University of Vienna. Currently, I am pursuing a Master's degree in Digital Humanities, where I focus on utilizing quantitative methods in the humanities. My academic interests encompass linguistic typology, grammar, and its neurological correlates, as well as literature and theater studies. Since March 2024 I have been serving as a Research Assistant at the Language Comprehension Lab, contributing to many exciting projects.

Contact me at grobauerh@ceu.edu !

Tiziana Srdoc

I am a Psychology graduate, currently studying Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna. I am interested in the developmental and evolutionary origins of language, and its interplay with cognition. For my master’s thesis, I am investigating the brain regions involved in the production and comprehension of object labels in 3-year-old children. I have been working as a research assistant at CEU since March 2024.